June 11, 2009

Amazon Kindle: A Great Gadget

This June 2009 is a special month for gadget lovers. Yesterday Amazon’s Kindle DX was released and 18th of this month Apple’s iPhone 3G S will be released. While I and my wife Shusmita already have our iPhone 3G, I am particularly in favor of Kindle to consider as the best gadget I can ever have.

Amazon’s Kindle DX is an electronic book reader, the third of it’s kind after it’s successful debut in late 2007 with the first generation followed by early this year with second generation also known as Kindle 2. Like I waited for iPhone to mature a little bit before I bought that, I also waited for Kindle platform to mature before I made up my mind to buy the latest generation Kindle (DX).

I love reading books, both in English and in my mother language Bengali. My decision behind buying the new larger size Kindle DX is primarily because it has a native PDF reader and hence I will be able to read Bengali PDF books which I won’t be in the case of Kindle 1 or 2. My only concern is the bigger size of DX makes it less portable. Before coming into this decision I have roamed around the Amazon Kindle discussion forum for a while along with some other online resources. If you look at my facebook news feed or my recent delicious bookmarks (http://delicious.com/ashikuzzaman/Kindle) you can easily guess that I am in Kindle fever. I am expecting a reading habit and experience change once I get my Kindle DX in my hand. I am going to order it 15th of this month and hence I should recieve it in my hand sometime early July. But whatever I have read so far about it, I can’t just wait to recieve it.

First, I love Amazon (and also Google) and want to be around them. When it comes to books and reading I consider Amazon the primary authority and expect creative innovations from them(one small example is the idea they came up with accessing the notes and highlights of the books online). I like the vision that Amazon has – to kindlize each and every book ever printed in any language. This pretty much removes Sony or any other non-Amazon platform (despite Google Books efforts) from my choice.

Second, I like the idea of bigger screen size.

Third, I want to read PDF books and documents. I have a good collection of non-english books in PDF formats. The ones I am more interested about are in Bengali language which I am sure Amazon’s PDF conversion program won’t support. So I will need a native PDF reader. This pretty much restricts me to Kindle DX instead of Kindle 2 despite the less portability of DX compared to K2 and Sony Reader.

Fourth, the larger memory 3.3 GB is not a must-have but a good incentive to me as I want to carry a huge library around without ever thinking of removing any of this.

Fifth, the accelerometer in DX is a plus for me.

But if I buy a second copy of Kindle for my wife or my father or brothers, I will buy Kindle 2 for them because of the portability issue.

One more thing I would like to add with interest here. I have published this blog a little earlier as a Kindle Blog available for subscription via Kindle. Amazon has made it so easy and trivial. I will post an entry or two every week to keep myself recorded in words here.

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I was on the fence for months before I finally decided to order my Kindle 2. I had been reading such mixed reviews about the device and about Amazon’s customer service that I simply could not decide about the purchase. This review is for all of those people, like me, that cannot decide if they need a Kindle 2 for themselves. Well, struggle with the decision no more and ORDER IT! I am so happy with my Kindle 2 and I look forward to reading it every single day. All of the problems that I was worried about are not problems at all. Downloading books is easy, the screen is NOT too dark, the font size is adjustable and the Kindle customer service support is terrific. I had a problem with my Kindle 2 and I was instantly connected with the most helpful representative. I did not have to wait on hold and the problem was solved in no time. I have made the highest recommendations of the Kindle 2 to my friends and family and will continue to do so in the future. I can say with absolute confidence, if you order your own Kindle 2 you will not be disappointed!!!